Conclusion: Breaking Free of the Bog—The Need for a Novel Impetus in the Implementation of the RTAI Act 2013

Abstract

This chapter, is the concluding chapter, comes as a personal reflection of the author’s experiences in campaigning and lobbying for the passage of the FOI law. It mentions his personal motivations for becoming engaged in the campaign and relays, in a conversational manner, how the campaign came to unfurl and transpire over time; a considerable period of time. This chapter explains how and why the author’s perspective on FOI came to change throughout the campaigning period, and most importantly, after the Act was passed. The challenges that the Act’s implementation has met with, which are fairly well-detailed here, and above all, the failure to tackle them appropriately.

He describes the immediate postwar environment as one where the relevance and need for an FOI law were not at all recognized, and how it was the efforts of civil society advocacy that finally garnered the attention of law-makers and politicians. There was then a shift towards the FOI bill, being used as political currency by whatever party occupied the opposition. The passage of the RTAI Act was given its first impetus when the World Bank (WB) marked FOI as a budget trigger, but then the enactment stalled once WB funds were released. Finally, the desire to join the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and gain from the Millennium Challenge Corporation spurred the government of Sierra Leone to finally and rapidly push the RTAI Act through. This chapter concludes by highlighting the centrality of FOI to the success of other governmental reforms.